Lawyers
Corporate partner Manuel Frey and litigation partner Jane O’Brien were featured on “The FinReg Pod,” a podcast series hosted by Professor Lee Reiners, executive director of the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke Law School. In the episode, “Bye Bye LIBOR,” Manuel and Jane discussed the role of regulators in facilitating an orderly transition away from LIBOR, the strengths and weaknesses of regulators’ preferred alternative to LIBOR, and the potential for rival benchmarks to gain traction.
Manuel and Jane also discussed their individual roles in helping clients navigate the challenges related to LIBOR transition. As a litigator, Jane says she is “counselling clients that are anticipating how things could go wrong down the road… …so for me, the focus has really been on internal governance issues, audit committee frameworks, process around transition and public disclosures, and also counterparty disclosures. From my perspective, companies will want to be able to demonstrate that they heeded their regulators’ guidance, took transition seriously and made every effort to be prepared.”
Manuel describes his role as “trying to ensure things don’t go wrong, so that we have a smooth transition and we don’t end up in a situation where we have to fight about winners and losers. The effort really [is] one of…monitoring what’s going on and understanding it and translating it for clients, and helping them along the timeline of implementation as more and more clarity comes out.”
